Get in the Car, Jupiter

by Fisher Amelie

  I walked back toward the pub to flag down a cabbie. A black cab swooped in for me and stuck his hand out of his window to open my door for me. I climbed in and he shut it behind me.

  “Where to, love?” a middle-aged man with a giant mustache and even bigger smile asked.

  “Robinson Street, please.”

  He shot forward and neither of us spoke for the short ride, which I was appreciative of.

  As he approached our street, no, Graham’s street, I leaned forward and placed my hand on the edge of his open partition window. “Number seven, please?”

  He slowed down and noticed the state of the road. I cringed. “’Fraid you’ll have to walk, love. No way of gettin in n’ out there. Construction and all that.”

  “That’s fine.” I sighed, throwing a few pounds through the window and opening the door before he could get to it.

  When I got out, the tears renewed tenfold. I found myself leaning against the wrought iron fences of a few terraced houses. Just get home. Just get home, I kept telling myself.

  “It’s not your home, though,” I confessed to the wind, which brought on a whole new rush of tears.

  Blubbering like a giant baby, I was too distracted by my pain to remember my neighbor’s exposed sunken terrace garden, a ten-foot drop onto concrete.

  Of course was all I remembered thinking as I tumbled down the rabbit hole.